Many of you know I've been holed up working on my memoir every morning for the last millennium, and thus haven't done a lot of speaking. (Okay, maybe it's not been that long.) The good news is that I am making progress on the book (actually, a "mutual memoir" about me and Willie). I finished a manuscript last December, and sent it out for review. Lots of insightful comments by some great writers and editors led to re-write that now keeps me busy from 8 am to noon. I'm about half done with that, having started again in June after finishing teaching at the university in late May. Cross your paws that this new version, once done sometime in late fall or early winter, will only need some tweaks. I'll keeping working throughout 2015, but by the end of the year, I think I will have run out of Read More
The Movie Max & Concerns about Breed Popularity
As you may know, a movie about a military dog, Max, is getting a lot of attention. I just read a summary of the plot, which convinced me that I'll be better off watching bad TV at home while rubbing my dogs' bellies than going to see it. It might be a great movie, who knows, (although the reviews are not stellar), but in it Max the Malinois is brought back from Afghanistan after watching his handler be shot and killed by another American soldier, later is chained and abandoned alone in a backyard, then severely injured fighting off two "bad guy" dogs. Next, he is accused of seriously biting a person, taken away by animal control to a pound, from which he escapes, and then... Enough. Sorry, I had a hard enough time watching the Border Collie in the movie Babe be wrongly accused of killing Read More
“It Depends” — The Answer, and the Next Question, to Everything
If you know my work you know that "It Depends" is my answer to 95% of all questions asked about dog behavior. Question: "Should I intervene if my dog growls at a puppy?" Answer: It depends. Question: "What would you do if your well-trained dog looked at you when you called him back, and then takes off running in the other direction?" Answer: It depends. I usually say "It depends" in partial jest, knowing how useless it must sound to the person hearing it. But "It Depends" has an important kernel of truth in it, because cookie cutter formulas don't work with animals as complicated as dogs. How to handle a behavioral issue depends on so many things: the age of the dog, the level of training, the intensity of the distraction, etc. I heard another version of this at the Derek Read More
Research on Resource Guarding
Citizen science--be there or be square. Researchers from the University of Guelph are conducting a survey about resource guarding in dogs. You can participate by going to this link and filling out the questionnaire. I hope you do--you'll see why as you read more... True confessions: I originally tried to take the survey in April, but didn't finish it. If you're on Facebook, you can see my post on April 24th about it. In that post I wrote: I took the survey myself and loved the videos that asked the viewer how they categorized what they saw, but got a bit frustrated at the end when the questions began to seem endless, and worse, impossible to answer correctly. (Ex: “How many people did you expose your new pup to at these four different ages: 4-8 weeks, 8 to 12 weeks?”). As if I could Read More
Well, Stuff Happens.
That could actually be a great title for a content-rich blog, but I'm afraid the blog I was working on got trumped by 1) the blog site crashing for several hours, 2) Tootsie's recurrent and unexplained UTI and need for an X-ray, and 3) Nellie the kitty showing up limping and clearly very, very unwell. Thus, instead of a blog about the questions to ask when someone (like me) says "It Depends," I'm just going to go right to a report on the farm and the sheepdogs. But keep your eyes out for a blog on "It Depends," and one on a survey on resource guarding in the near future. MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Everyone but the sheep and the cats piled into the car yesterday to go to the Laughing Frog Sheepdog Trial in Kansasville, WI. Put on by hosts Tresa and Don Laferty, the trial is designed Read More
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